Examining Female Roles in Western versus Japanese Animations

I apologize rather prematurely for this post, it’s term papers and finals week, so not only is the blog title far from witty, it sounds like the beginning to a bad JStor article written by an undergrad.

However, someone just showed me this open letter by Linda Holmes on the NPR blog. It reminded me of when I was going through my late night (read: early morning) animation fix of Miyazaki, and was astounded during a few of them that my love for the filmmaking wasn’t constantly pitted against the female protagonists need to support jagged-edged gender binaries.

Oh, and P.S. Linda: Susan Sontag would love to argue this one out, but half the fun of children’s films and books are the highly politicized (though often implicit) morals and theologies they bring about. Sometimes they SCREAM for a better world, though the characters may only whisper. Tonight my seventh-grade brother summarized a book for me that he just finished reading and was incredibly excited about. Though the plot line was simple, it featured a girl fighting for women’s rights in a fettered, Patriarchal society. If we take each part of a film to have an intended purpose, a princess can and will never be just a princess.